Remember those rugged plastic ‘singalong’ cassette players you could buy for pre-school children? The Aiptek MobileCinema D10 looks a projector version of the same kind of thing. Encased in tough, nursery-blue plastic, it is the least fragile projector we have ever tested, and the only one that required absolutely no warmup or …

"If you are looking for a quality image and surround sound, keep looking"

Projector for £160?

If you really want to play with a projector at home, then pick up a £60 (ebay) OH projector like the ones that were used in schools before data projectors, an broken TFT to fit off of ebay (£5 to £50, depending on how many you go through. you want one that has no working backlight. And it also needs to be correctly configured in side - PCB on only one edge of the display.), some way to support the screen off of the projector(currently using large diameter dowel) and a fan to blow air underneath it (£5).

No Keystone adjustment, and you'll then need to play with cardboard shields to block light spill, but it is the cheapest way to play with a projector at home that I know of. and you can keep refining it. for example, replace the supplied lens with a compound lens to provide a more even focus of the image (£30, ebay)

showing snowboarding DVDs on the wall during a pre-ski-holiday party

Yes, it's a toy.

So why not review it as one? The buttons aren't "childishly clunky": they are, or hope to be, "child-friendly". Why didn't El Reg give it to someone with kids for review? Parents don't give a stuff about resolution - they want to know how well it survives a toddler's tantrum.

no surround sound

David, even if you had a bit of surround sound kit lying about, you couldn't even plug it in. A proper DVD/projector combo would at least have a headphonesocket, perhaps even a spdif output. It's meant for kids and it aspires to no more. Film buffs would probably be disappointed in the low resolution anyway.

Next week...

Cant wait...

To see QVC et al try and sex this up..

This funky blue multi format dvd player has its own built in projector so stick it in your pocket, go round to a mates and see how many opening credits you get through before you all fuck off to the pub instead.

DVDs for Children?

I'm sorry, but DVDs are far to complicated for children with all those menues and such. Plus it adds a whole bunch of very delicate optics and mechanics to the device.

It would have been by far the smarter move to just ditch the DVD drive and have a USB-host socket. The firmware on the device would wait for an USB-stick or an external input and display an image or short animation encouraging the user to do either of those. With a teeny weeny bit more hardware you could even enable the hardware to check for connected, but not turned on devices, so it won't display the "connect device" message when a device is already connected.

If an USB stick is inserted, it should simply look for playable files. If there are several, it should decode one of the frames in the middle of each file and display them in a menu, along with pictures of the buttons to press. Files which belong together having file names like (2 of 5) should be grouped as a single video. Photos should be shown as previews first, with the possibility to switch between them.

You misunderestimate...

...children. My son had, by 13 months, figured out what remote controls were, which way to point them to do stuff, and that some affect some things and some affect others. And he doesn't actually *watch TV* - this is just from grabbing them when we accidentally left them around. By 14 months he learned that fun ensued when he pressed the blue-lit power symbol on my laptop, and extrapolated that to fun ensuing if he pressed the same symbols on LCD monitors and computer cases.

Babies are smart. Toddlers are smarter. *Children* are even smarter. I have no doubt that it would be dead easy to train any 2+-year-old to use a DVD menu system.